The U.K.’s top intelligence agency snagged emails from journalists from the United States’ and United Kingdom’s top media companies as part of its surveillance program, the Guardian reported.
According to documents released by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden in 2013, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) nabbed some 70,000 emails in a matter of minutes, including those from renown news organizations such as the New York Times, NBC, the Washington Post, Reuters, BBC, Le Monde and the Guardian.
The emails, which included conversations between reporters and editors about unpublished stories, were collected as part of a test exercise in November 2008 using one of the agency’s many fiber-optic cable taps onto the internet mainframe.
But while the GCHQ’s collection of the emails were initially used to test a then-new data-stripping tool, it led to the agency listing investigative journalists alongside terrorists and hackers as a security threat, the Guardian reported.
News of the UK’s email surveillance comes a week after British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that encrypted messaging should be banned so the government can better protect against terror attacks.
The British government hasn’t been particularly amenable to the privacy movement happening in other European countries, which aims to limit government surveillance and data collection from tech companies such as Google and Facebook.
Britain previously forced the Guardian to destroy hard drives containing NSA files leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. And after Cameron’s meeting with President Obama Friday, the prime minister said he wanted the US and UK to pressure American tech companies to give spy agencies special access to encrypted messages.
Despite vehement disapproval from the public and privacy advocates, the Obama Administration has defended the need for special access to encrypted data. The Federal Bureau of Investigations and Justice Department criticized Apple and Google for encrypting smartphone data, maintaining that law enforcement must have quick access to criminal suspects’ phone data to protect victims and save lives.